M+S tyres no longer accepted in French Alps

A snowHead

Thanks for the info & link- I will go through the regs in detail later!

A snowHead

The thing is to consider this in terms of personal safety. Tyres with only M+S markings on them aren't winter tyres. They just have chunky treads. That's all. They probably won't be different to any summer tyre in terms of compound chemistry or sipes. So, basically, don't consider them of any particular advantage in wet, cold or snow compared to regular summer tyres.

If you're going to the mountains, then if money and convenience was no object, you'd be on winter tyres, or all-season tyres because both are better in cold/wet/snow than summers, or anything with only 'M+S' on it.

Quality all-season tyres also often have the three-peaks-and-snowflake (3PMF) designation of winter tyres.

As you might expect, there's a wide variation in both all-season and winter tyre brands and products, with most being biased somewhat in some way. Usually this is snow-biased versus warmer-weather; handling vs performance; sports car vs SUV; and so on - just like summer tyres vary. You take your pick.

So in a way, it's irrelevant whether a country is dropping the acceptance of 'M+S' to equate to winter tyre conformance. You would always have been a lot safer on a decent all-season or winter tyre anyway.

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

I agree about the safety aspect. On my last car I had a summer and winter set and usually swapped in December / April.

The ones I have now do say 'All Season' as well as the M&S marking. What this means in practice I have no idea. I suspect they will be OK if not as good as proper winter tyres.

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I've just bought a couple of new winter tyres in readiness for the coming season. Two of my old ones "went wobbly" - they felt like the wheels were out of balance, but no amount of re-balancing would fix it. Once home in the spring, my friendly local tyre fitter looked at them and said it was the tyres themselves that were the problem. They were just approaching the 4mm limit so due for replacement anyway, but still a bit worrying, especially as a friend runs the same tyres on his car and has had the same problem!

Anyway, through the course of researching what to get, I chanced upon this explainer which I though was well put together.

https://www.michelin.co.uk/auto/advice/winter-tyres-guide/winter-tyre-markings

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So yesterday brought the first real snow of the winter across large parts of France, with up to 30cm falling around us here in Alsace, brought out the not unsurprising results that a large proportion of French drivers have ignored the winter tyre rules, and are also crap at driving in snow.

Drove into Basel last night, around 5 ish, in the LandRover with winter tyres, so I was fine, and there was little traffic going that way anyway but the road coming out of Basel was effectively blocked as far as the village of Folgensbourg, some 11.5km of near stationery traffic. Couple of steep uphill sections with cars all over the place, and I personally saw at least half a dozen, at points where they could have been moving, quite clearly on summer tyres with wheels spinning helplessly.

Coming back this morning there were apparently still dozens when my wife came home for around ten o'clock, most had been removed an hour and a half later when I did it, but still a few around.

So what is it about the French that makes them so prone to ignore rules that have been in place for some time now, with the signs up at various points of the route for at least two years? At what point will the police take any action and start routinely checking vehicles?

Spent the last hour and a half shovelling snow - I managed to get the Landie up without too much problem, just needed to clear one tyre's width and do it with the diff lock in low, but we have about 100m of uphill drive and we needed to clear most of it to get my wife's Audi TT Quattro up - she'd earlier abandoned it about a quarter of the way up, with the snow higher than the front of the car, so I had to move it bak down to get the Landy past.

Now relaxing with a Vin Chaud and looking forward to a hot bath,

Local news article about it here but doesn't seem to mention the inter tyre law at all, AFAICT. And when did snow storms start getting named? This one's called "Tempête Caetano" apparently.

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

I thought Basel was in Switzerland?

But the French certainly do skid around, and off, the road on summer tyres in the winter. However, they are not breaking French law in doing so. They are compliant with the law if they have chains in the boot. Doesn't say they have to put them on the wheels. Though sometimes the police do insist on chains, even on top of winter tyres.

After all it is free

@Origen, Sure, but I'm pretty sure the ones who were unable to proceed up the hill did not have chains either, otherwise they'd have used them. And of the dozens of abandoned cars most were still on the road, would have been perfectly easy to proceed if they had fitted the chains.

I heard several exasperated local stories of how the "first snows" always seemed to catch out the locals responsible for getting ploughs out on the road as they left it so late to get the chains on them (which must be a massive undertaking, to be fair) and were always "caught by surprise" by a big fall of snow which had been clearly forecast for days. I think it's a big assumption that anybody with chains in the boot won't get stuck in a snowdrift. It happens to people with 4WD too - plenty of them abandoned after a snowy night. Heroic over-confidence!!

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The difficulty with chains in the boot is having somewhere safe to put them on when & where needed. Lying in the slush fiddling with cold linkages while traffic continues past spraying you being none too pleasant at the best of times.

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You know it makes sense.

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M+S tyres no longer accepted in French Alps

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